Do you remember the submarine that was lost in the remains of the titanic a few weeks ago? The co-founder of the responsible company, Ocean Gatenow wants to send humans into the atmosphere of Venus.
As reported Business Insider, William Sohnlein created the foundation Humans2Venus to initiate commercial trips to the neighboring planet. Specifically, the businessman wants 1000 people to go live in a floating colony in Venus by 2050.
The OceanGate Expeditions co-founder has been in the media eye since five people died on a June 18 submarine owned by his company, including his former colleague and friend Stockton Rush.
The hottest planet in the solar system
Guillermo Söhnlein does not let the Titan tragedy dampen his innovative spirit. As Insider told him, going to Venus is “less aspirational than putting a million people on the Martian surface.”
It should be noted that Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system and its atmosphereaccording to NASA data, it is full of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. Not only that, it also has an atmospheric pressure 90 times higher than Earth’s.
But Söhnlein points out that there is research that indicates that there is a strip in the Venusian atmosphere where conditions are less intense and could be favorable for a floating human colony.
This entrepreneur wants the mission of his companies to be the same: to take humanity beyond its natural limits on Earth.
“I think I’ve been driven to help make humanity a multi-planetary species since I was 11 years old,” he said in the interview.
Söhnlein indicated that OceanGate was the first step in achieving this. “Rush and I saw underwater exploration, and especially the use of manned submersibles, as the closest thing we could do to going into space and furthering that vision without actually going into space,” he said.
Forget OceanGate. Forget Titan: Guillermo Söhnlein
Humans2Venus, a project that Söhnlein co-founded with businessman Khalid Al-Ali, will seek to develop techniques to reduce launch operating costs and finance space missions.
Söhnlein relinquished control of OceanGate to Stockton Rush in 2013. Its co-founder refused to follow the parameters of underwater exploration experts who stress that deep-submersion vehicles should be sphere-shaped and made of titanium steel. That design and materials made it impossible to have affordable multi-person trips to the bottom of the ocean.
The Titan submersible that OceanGate decided to use was tube-shaped and made of carbon fiber. As we already know, the material did not resist so many immersions and ended up collapsing with its crew in June 2023.
For Söhnlein there is nothing wrong with this type of desire to break barriers and innovate at all costs, something very common in Silicon Valley. In addition, he indicated that the deaths of the Titan’s passengers should not stop investigations of carbon fiber submersibles.
“Forget OceanGate. Forget Titan. Forget Stockton. Humanity could be on the brink of a breakthrough and not take advantage of it because we as a species will shut down and go back to the status quo,” he said.
Söhnlein said the accident should not stop humans from continuing to investigate carbon-fiber-hulled submersibles as a way to reach the ocean floor.
Editorial Team The editorial team of EMPRENDEDOR.com, which for more than 27 years has worked to promote entrepreneurship.